Dear Reader: Why I’m Writing to My Dead Brother
On family, AIDS, death, religion. And silence.
Dear Reader,
My brother Danny died of AIDS in March 1994. He was thirty-nine. Six years before that, our older brother Moshe died of cancer. We were four kids, the children of a rabbi, raised Orthodox on Staten Island. Danny and Moshe left religion in their late teens and left home for Manhattan. I stayed religious, married, and moved to Israel.
Our sister Geula stayed religious and she was with Danny in his last days. Our parents and I were six thousand miles away.
For years I believed that was the whole story. Two brothers who lost their way, one brother and a sister who didn’t.
Then my own life shifted. I lost my balance, and I needed something. Someone. Maybe my brothers.
I went back to the photographs, the letters hidden in drawers, Danny’s journals, the things our family never said out loud. I started writing to him.
Those letters became a memoir, A Ferry Going the Other Way. It is finished, and I am now sending it out to agents.
This Substack tells the story in parallel, from angles the book couldn’t take. A photograph and what I see in it now. A page from a journal. A letter never sent. A secret. A confession.
You can start with the posts below.
Please subscribe to receive new pieces as I release them.
— Eli Jacobs
Our Last Photo: What We Don’t See
